Kneepads. That’s the nickname for People magazine in the underground gossip world, a reference to the safety equipment that their writers might need when performing a special service for celebrities. 

If your celebrity news came from People, Entertainment Tonight, and the Today Show, you might think that JLo can sing and that Britney was mentally stable. If you read the occasional article about the entertainment world in the New York Times or watched a segment on CNN, you might think that Selena Gomez was sober and that Meghan Markle was kind to her staff. The underground gossip scene says something different.

Entertainment “news” in all forms of traditional media, from Vogue to the Wall Street Journal, is glossy and light. The mainstream media’s failure to provide real journalism on the celebrity world is a huge blind spot, leading to disasters like Weinstein and Epstein and to the growing suspicion of traditional media. A huge underground gossip scene on Reddit, Substack, old school blogs, and even Instagram has arisen to crowd-source entertainment news.

Read more at Apt. 11D, The Newsletter